Among those who take cholesterol lowering medication, does taking this cholesterol lowering medication change their systolic blood pressure?
Background
Controlling blood pressure (BP) reduces the risk for cardiovascular disease.
Ways to control blood pressure include exercise, the white coat effect, pharmacotherapy, a healthy diet, regulating sodium, reducing alcohol use, smoking, getting sleep, reducing stress, and regular health check-ups.
ANH PUT ANY OTHER LIT STUFF HERE
DAG
Statistical Analysis
Clean the dataset
Build a propensity model and ATT weights
Run diagnostics on the propensity model
Build an outcome model
Run sensitivity analysis
Key Results
The cleaned data had 20,822 rows and 3 columns after deriving \(X, Y, \boldsymbol{Z}\) from our adjustment set and dropping missing values.
The propensity model and ATT weighting produced data that was balanced.
Using a sandwich estimator to derive the standard errors, we observe an ATT of 9.26 with 95% CI (8.578,9.941).
A conservative unmeasured confounding variable setup would require an effect size of over 6 times the ATT to tip the CI to the null at the 95% level.
Diagnostic Plots
Diagnostic Plots
Diagnostic Plots
notes: we assume missing at random X is cholesterol med use, Z is total cholesterol, Y is mean blood pressure up next: diagnostic plots :::